ECE News Story

NSF grant for Narayan funds 'common randomness' research

Professor Prakash Narayan (ECE/ISR) is the principal investigator for a new National Science Foundation grant, Common Randomness, Multiuser Secrecy and Tree Packing. The three-year, $400K grant will take a multiuser information theoretic approach to investigate innate theoretical connections that exist between multiuser source and channel coding, information theoretic network security, and combinatorial tree packing algorithms in theoretical computer science.

The research is of compelling interest to the theory as well as the engineering practice of network source and channel coding, and network security in emerging wireless technologies. Addressing broad classes of network source and channel models with correlation and cooperation, Narayan's team will study explicit and precise characterizations of basic structural connections between multiuser data compression, channel coding, network security and combinatorial tree packing, and the underlying role of common randomness (i.e., coordinated randomization). The research will develop information theoretic principles for associated signal processing algorithms. It will apply source coding and channel coding techniques for providing information theoretic network secrecy in encrypted communication, and investigate points of contact between combinatorial tree packing algorithms and network security.